“Four years ago our fathers proposition all men.Now we are engaged in testing whether so
conceived.We are great on a resting
place.It is altogether fitting that we
do this.But men, living and dead, can never forget what they did here.It is for us to be unfinished work.It is rather for us the full measure of
devotion, that we resolve a new birth.”

Well, what do you know?It seems as if those rumors about Abraham Lincoln might have been true
after all.He does appear to be a bit
confused about the facts of life, however, and his grammar is terrible.But wait, there’s more.

“If we first judge what to do, and how to do it, I do expect
it where the public shall rest, till it shall become alike lawful in all the
states.This opened all the national
territory to be otherwise perverted.Then opened the loose squatter.Nebraska Bill was passing through a territory
and held him for a long time.The new
president had ever been entertained.And
well may he cling to that squatter.That struggle was made on a piece of
machinery, imported as such to the benefit of the citizens.

“This point is made thus to enhance him against the holder,
but not to be pressed.Several things
were to be left perfectly free to outsiders.The individual withheld the outgoing felicitation in favor of the
cautious patting and petting, preparatory to mounting him.”

If you doubt that Lincoln really said these things, you
might change your mind after Abraham
Lincoln: Midnight Cowboy hits the theaters next summer.Of course, you could simply look it up for
yourself.The opening paragraph is from
the Gettysburg Address, and the second collection of quotes comes from his
House Divided speech.You’ll find that
he said all of these words, and in the same order in which they are represented
here.Hence, these quotations are
entirely accurate, at least according to the lofty editorial standards of MSNBC.

This is how that network excerpted a recent stump speech by
Mitt Romney, during which he referenced a regional convenience store chain
called Wawa.

“By the way, where do you get your hoagies here?Do you get them at Wawa’s?Is that where you get them?Well, I went to a place today called
Wawa’s.You ever been to Wawa’s?Anybody been there?Some people don’t – I’m sorry, I know it’s a
very big state divide.But we went to
Wawa’s … I was at Wawa’s.I went in to
order a sandwich.You press the little
touch-tone keypad, all right?You just
touch that, and, you know, the sandwich comes.You touch this, touch this, touch this, go pay the cashier, there’s your
sandwich.It’s amazing.”

Anchorwoman Andrea Mitchell found this amusing, because it
fit in with the media’s caricature of the wealthy Republican who can’t relate
to “the little guy.”Romney came off
sounding like John Kerry after a field trip to Wendy’s, except that he actually
liked it.What Mitchell didn’t know, or
more likely didn’t care about, was that the main point of the speech had been
edited out.

Where the ellipsis appears after the phrase, “But we went to
Wawa’s,” this is what Romney said: “And it was instructive to me, because I saw
the difference between the private sector and the governmental sector. Look, the people who work in government are
good people, and I respect what they do, but you see the challenge with
government is it doesn’t have competition.”He revisited this theme at the point where the MSNBC excerpt stopped,
when he added, “People in the private sector have learned how to compete.It’s time to bring some competition to the
federal government so it can begin to respond to customers, which are you. [sic]”

Romney clearly meant for his professed amazement to be taken
ironically, in that it truly would have been amazing for government to conduct
itself as efficiently as a private enterprise like Wawa.In reality, he probably isn’t that much more
impressed with the store’s sandwich-making process than President Lincoln was with
the amorous escapades of Nebraska Bill.

MSNBC cut and pasted Romney’s words like letters on a ransom
note, deliberately arranging them to say something they didn’t mean in their
original context.That’s not the news,
any more than the quotes attributed to Lincoln here constitute a biography.

To borrow another condensed quote from Honest Abe, “You can
fool people.”